Hunter's Song
by Krahae
Summary: She'd taken refuge far anything familiar, as the hunger crept up behind her eyes. Hiding from herself, her past, and the Galactic Federation. A plot to invade the independent Rim systems she called home brings all those things back to the fore.


Disclaimer: Don't own Metroid.

Vaguely inspired I think by Hatchling, from Eyes5. It's been a year since I read it, and this just happened so I can't be sure. Possibly a result of picking up my own martial training to something rather impressive, among other personal issues that shall remain undeclared.

–

It wasn't the most comfortable thing, not really, but she dealt with it, to see outside her ship this way. With the interior dimmed to practically utter darkness, all that remained was the stars and the deep black between them.

The woman within the small starship perched precarious and unsteadily on the unlighted console, all gangly limbs and blonde hair in what remained of the cabin's lighting. As usual, she'd spent the first available hours of owning the vessel to tailor the cockpit to her desires. First and foremost, was learning how to cut off the lights, and what part of the console and controls she could sit on, to get as close to the reinforced pressure glass as possible. The cold was uncomfortable, what seeped in despite the thermal sinks that worked not only to bleed off engine heat but also prevent the absolute chill of space to leak in. Still, it added to the effect, rather than lessened it. It was a simple illusion, but one she craved.

Dark as it was, silent as it was, she could almost feel like she was out _there_, rather than held safe and secure inside her little lifeboat, the _Higanbana_. Could almost hear the crystalline silence of space. It was, she imagined, like the sound of water, deeper than was comfortable, darker than the sunlight above. All pressure and silence, with a certain sound behind it. Something unique, fleeting.

Scientifically she knew there was no sound in space. She also knew there was no such things as ghosts and parallel dimensions, but that didn't stop such things from believing in her, and her universe. So, she indulged in a slight madness, to offset the larger ones, looming behind her in the darkness.

It was her ship, after all. She could sit and cling to those illusions all she wanted to.

Right now, illusions were all she seemed to have.

–

The door to the small living space made a welcoming "_bree-weep_" before irising open. It was standard for this complex, but it still bothered her. Badly. It was far too much like the sound of a certain hatchling alien... Despite all her efforts, Samus could not find the mechanism that caused that noise, unlike her ship's interior lighting. So, she tolerated it, though not with grace.

With a wince and a blank face, she entered her current home, refusing to let her memories wander.

"I'm home," she murmured, a slight rasp in her voice from disuse. There wasn't an answer, of course. Why would there be...

There was little room for anyone else besides her, there. Those commercial spaces allowed by local government for outsiders were modeled after starship accommodations for various races that frequented the system, so places like this tended to be the very base of comfort – if it could be called that. A cot, a refresher which due to local water limitations was little more than a tube that got very hot and humid rather than a shower, a terminal, and a food reconstitution station. Barely habitable by humans, but she was barely human, so it would do.

After all, she wasn't in a place where the Federation frequented. Events at Biologic Space Laboratories ensured that.

Lips pressed into a faint line, the bounty hunter tossed her small parcel of food goods and domestic supplies onto a chair, stalking back to her refresher. Half an hour and a few hundred local credits later for water use, she was slightly more cheerful, cleaner, and not quite as irritable. As she sat down at a terminal above her small cot, the blonde woman faintly whistled, the noise coming from her larynx rather than lips. Chozo blood did wonders for her vocal range.

Fingers nimbly working, the terminal came to life, and various advertisements flashed by with subliminal force. Quick, attentive eyes took in the spread, finally picking out a few things worth note. More credits spent, she took what looked like a cigar-shaped black polymer device from her small collection of personal items, pulling it open to reveal a datapad. The transparent display synced with a few of the items she'd optioned to download from the local information net, before she snapped it shut again.

Laying down, Samus keyed the terminal's display off, but left an audio cycle of light thunderstorm playing. The sound and dark were calming, centering for her. It felt like home, even if she knew it was just a facade. For all her wandering, all the time that passed as she sat in stasis or over relativistic distances, only two places had ever felt that way. Felt like home.

When she was aboard a ship, it was the black between stars, easing her mind, cooling it, letting it lend her that same bitter, empty, uncaring cold.

Planetside, it was Zebes. The rains of Crateria were where she grew up.

She wondered what it said about her, drifting off to sleep, that the two places she felt most comfortable were devoid now of life.

–

Two months.

That's how long it took, before she gave in, and took a 'kill' order. It had taken less time, last time, and for the year since BSL, she'd been pushing herself harder and harder to lengthen that stretch of ticks on a clock between them.

Maybe it would have been easier in Federation space to hunt things that were... easier prey. For her. But out on the Rim, there wasn't much she could do. Kill orders were rare, and when one came up, she had to work hard to get there first. Bounty hunters, after all, rarely took those orders unless they enjoyed the work. Those that did so, were usually good, if they could continue it.

Samus was fairly sure very few others had her body count, however, but didn't let it dull her instincts. A few destroyed planets under her belt didn't mean anything if the itch in her mind ramped up high enough to cause another... incident.

Kill two birds, as the saying went.

"Figures," the woman muttered, swiping a hand through her now-wet hair. Rain poured down from dull steel-colored skies, the water colored nearly the same with ash and soot. Perhaps she should stop tempting fate with her usual late-night sleeping aids. At least now, she reasoned, there was less to get in her way. Her hair was styled shorter now, feathering out about her face. That wasn't the only recent change, however. She also didn't wear her trademark armor – she didn't posses it anymore – nor her newer suit, which was slowly degrading and breaking down. Clad in what she'd referred to as her "Zero" suit, named for its poor, in her opinion, defensive capabilities and a long dark coat over it, she crept along in the darkened hall mindful of surrounding noise and stimuli. A hand drifted down to her belt, checking her gear briefly before she proceeded.

On her belt were three Stakers, tissue and genetic samplers specifically tuned to the bounties she was after. Modern bounty hunting was an enlightened business, after all. There was no need to haul around corpses, heads, or ears as there used to be. Stakers would verify the target, transmit the signal to the local bounty office, and then a retrieval team would be sent to clean up, or pick up, depending on the nature of the bounty.

Tonight's order was clean up – and so she was also carrying a sidearm of questionable legality. Space Pirate armaments weren't precisely illegal in this system, but then again, no one really liked them outside their controlled space, so seeing one of the contained fusion-drive weapon pods was rare. There was also the tricky situation of pinning down what race the Pirates stole what part of their technology from, making their weapons both highly sought after for lack of concise traceability, and dangerously skirting the edge of those same rules. Pirate weaponry was probable cause for search and seizure on most non-Pirate worlds.

Samus smiled grimly. "Not much left to seize, really." Regardless, she pulled the weapon and checked its charge – then smiled again. Plenty for this. After the events of BSL, she'd loosened up on her rather black-and-white opinions of the universe, seeing what her own supposedly morally superior Federation had been doing. Such an opening of the mind also came with the realization soon after that her Fusion Suit was slowly degrading, losing its previous potency. Use accelerated the process, so she'd tossed it in a small cryo chamber, hoping to preserve its potency for real need.

Why it was doing so independent of her was still a mystery, though she had a good idea. Like her previous versions, all built off of and based on the original Chozo design, the Fusion Suit only maintained its power as long as her blood contained the specific markers needed to activate its abilities. The Chozo didn't believe in complacency, so such things would never be permanent for her. Need, effort, and ingenuity rewarded her with skills, opening up her armor's more esoteric abilities. She knew there were permanent versions, those were what the Power Suit's abilities were based on after all, but not where.

Perhaps it was the Chozo's way of limiting her, considering her less-than-ideal motivations, things Old Bird had constantly warned her of. Vengeance for its own sake. Giving in to hatred, fear, ignorance.

Like she had. Old Bird knew her too well, it seemed.

Sighing, she regardless missed the power and grace it offered, augmenting her own hybrid blood. It wasn't as if she needed the thing for the work she took planetside, these days, but it was a... tangible memory. Of more peaceful times, ironically enough.

Shaking off her rambling thoughts, Samus ducked low after seeing the small glint of light off a watchful mechanical eye. She was close enough to be running into her quarry's defenses, it appeared.

"Best not keep them waiting," she mused, ducking around the corner and placing a precise bolt of charged plasma through the lens. Striding up the the shorted, prematurely irising door, she trilled a lilting whistle in Chozo, that roughly translated as, "_Knock, knock_."

–

There were a few reasons she decided on a kill order, this round.

One, the money was excellent, and would pad her account nicely for a while. Rent, food, Fuel Gel, maintenance fees, dock fees, ship maintenance, and her own few luxuries took a steady income. Kill order bounties were usually risky, and risky meant money.

Two, she mused ducking behind a flimsy wall, scenting the air, was her own edge. People fearing for their lives fought harder. For someone with a body count in the billions, she needed to stay sharp. That's a lot of aunts and uncles, to suddenly show up with an axe to grind.

Three... the itch behind her eyes was getting worse.

Ducking low and rolling, she caught motion, and took another half-second to determine it was a non-threat, before coming up in a crouch. The noise of her landing startled the cat, or cat-like thing, and it warbled its distress before fleeing. A curious voice called after the errant animal, probably a pet or vermin control, and Samus released the installed safety on her weapon.

Curiously, there wasn't much resistance, considering the place she'd found had security cameras or monitoring. The lumbering Kirken however matched one of her targets, and she wasted no time punching through the being's thick outer shell with her plasma pistol, following it with a rolling dive that landed on the Kirken's chest, throwing it to the floor.

Kirkens were an odd species, she noted absently, mid-rush. The only one she'd had any extensive contact with was Trace, a sniper-gone-bounty hunter that she'd run afoul of during the Alimbic fiasco. They had a strange physiology that seemed similar to many other space-faring races that have been doing so for long periods, having migrated to an exoskeletal system. There was little actual Kirken for their mass, however, as the main body was contained within the 'torso' of that exoskeleton, with very little remaining soft tissue dedicated to other portions of their body.

Even what passed for a head was more a sensory ganglia, contained in thick armor. It didn't contain a brain, and could be healed and repaired without damage to the Kirken if lost. It was a very functionally designed species – but annoying for what Samus had in mind. Lucky for her, plasma rounds rarely failed to penetrate most armors, organic or otherwise.

Before the gangly alien could move, Samus thrust her bare right hand into the cracked shell, making skin-to-skin contact with the surprisingly hot inner flesh of the Kirken. Eyes bright with battlelust and something darker, the humanoid bounty hunter let her vision focus into that strange spectrum that she'd found so alien once before, hunting X parasites.

The room, the alien, and everything else faded to a white-wash transparency, only defined by small networks and specks here and there that indicated living things. Webs of energy, pulsing and tying the Kirken together wound around below her, red and angry looking. In contrast, her own hand looked cool, radiating a blue-green aura that seemed faint and lacking. That glow seemed to focus and tighten, as the bright red stalled, then swarmed toward her hand suddenly in torrents. That same red and delicious force surged up her limb, stunning her briefly in its intensity, before the sensation dulled, became more manageable. It was always like this, when she waited too long.

Distantly she could hear the Kirken scream in its warbling, sibilant tongue, but she ignored it. Those screams only grew louder for a brief moment as the alien finally understood what was happening, and with feeble arms tried to displace the feeding Metroid hybrid.

After a short while, Samus pulled her hand free with a visible effort, leaving just enough energy within the Kirken to let it live long enough to register to a Staker. Eyes locked onto her prey, entranced still with the play and network of pulsing life below her, the blonde jammed the sensor device into the same abused rend in the alien's natural armor. Much as its name implied, it was a spike of metal with a cap that housed small transmitters, which sampled and verified her targets. A small "beep" and a green light preceded the hunter finishing her unorthodox meal, this time in silence.

Some time after the events leading to the destruction of BSL and then SR388, she'd discovered the less-beneficial side to her new genetics. Already less human that those around her, the Chozo portion of her alterations merely made her more durable, slightly faster, stronger. The real benefit was to her mind, which was significantly sharper and quicker to analyze and manage data. It also allowed her to access and use artifacts of that race, something the advanced bird-like people made sure to safeguard. Few others could even understand, much less use those technologies. Despite it all, she took little from them, as far as her body betrayed. Stronger bones and muscles didn't change her appearance, though she was somewhat tall for her original species, and had a slightly more lilting voice, capable of the peculiar Chozo bird-speech.

In much the same way, her recent augmentation of Metroid genetics left no true traces, though the combination did leave its mark in her eyes. While using her altered sight, something that allowed her to home in on any nearby living thing, the outer ring of her usually crystal-blue irises drained of color, leaving an odd amber hued border to the normal blue. For some reason, it also gave her a slight elongating of her pupil, though one would need to be in nearly intimate contact to see it. She'd only learned these things from a ship-scan of her person, making sure that she didn't affect worse changes.

Her fear may have been irrational, but knowing she bore a Metroid's sight made her worry her own eyes would be little more than blank windows, showing three angry red nuclei. Seeing only those small cosmetic changes relieved her, despite the strangeness of her abilities and needs now.

Needing to feed on life-force was harder to accept. That reluctance lead to long periods of fasting, that left her lethargic and slow of mind, her own body slowly eating away at its own reserves of life-force, much like a malnourished child wasted away. Two months was her current record, but she payed a heavy toll for resisting the hunger.

Samus sat and panted heavily, her body tingling like a slowly waking limb as it quickly shunted the Kirken's stolen energy to starved tissues. She knew in time her body would acclimatize to a Metroid's feeding habits, likely by developing new organs to store or manage the energy better, but for now the heady rush was drug-like in intensity, and her normally sharp mind went blank for long moments, as it swam in a euphoric haze.

Reflexes honed through years of battle kept her head attached, as she ducked and spun without thinking, the bolt of condensed electricity passing where she'd been with a distortion of air and scent of ozone. Stray locks of her sun-colored hair stood up with the bled-off static of the beam's passage. Coming up snarling, the blonde returned fire, aiming for the joints of knees and arms.

Restrain her urges she may, but she took the bounty for a kill order for a reason. No sense wasting a good meal by burning it to death with plasma.

Another Kirken, this one armed with a weapon of Federation design bore down on her with a vengeance, causing the hunter to jump, roll, and duck before she had a clean shot. Seeing the rifle, however, a frisson of worry worked up her spine. Fed weapon, out on the Rim? A quick visual accounting of the being showed it too was listed on her bounty roster, and a feral smile spread across her lips. "Hey, were you related to that other Kirken?" She called out in Rim Common, the tongue a coarse series of clicks and hisses, reminiscent of a Space Pirate with a lisp.

There was a pause in fire, and a muted roar of rage. "Good," she murmured, listening for footsteps and with her hand on the ground, feeling for them as well. "He was rather tasty."

Her flippant commentary seemed to enrage the other alien, which was what she ultimately wanted. A grinding series of clicks and the clatter of a dropped weapon was her only warning, and she took it readily. Lunging up and grabbing hold of a ceiling support, she watched in mild amusement as the now-transformed alien crashed through the wall she'd ducked behind.

"So, Trace wasn't the only one to have that talent," she mused, dropping down lightly to score several hits on the alien's carapace, eliciting another enraged roar. Annoyingly, the creature seemed unphased, and charged again, this time clipping the bounty hunter and sending her into a wall roughly.

Cursing in Rim Common, she took aim again, this time separating a limb from the Kirken's torso as it charged, causing it to screech and dig into the artificial floor, churning up ceramic and plastics in a splatter of debris. Wasting no time she unclipped another Staker, jamming it into the Kirken's exposed limb joint, causing another warble of pain.

Samus rolled her eyes, "Oh stop being such an infant," the blonde sniped, this time bypassing the armor entirely, opting to instead use the exposed neural ganglia of the Kirken's head. "Die like your life meant something, rather than whimpering and screaming."

The alien, unsurprisingly, didn't go quietly as she drained its energy with a brutal quickness. Lingering last time nearly got her killed – there was still another target to be dealt with, and it would likely cause her some difficulty.

Small sensors she'd placed around the premises were standing silent sentinel if her final target tried to make a run for it, the interface for them clipped to her belt. It sat silent as she made her way deeper into the facility. Without her Scan Visor, the many computer terminals weren't accessible, but she didn't worry too much. This wasn't an infiltration into a hostile ship or station or planet – just a large converted shipyard warehouse, full of contraband and her three bounties.

Blood and dust clung to her blue skinsuit, and made the dark overcoat she wore over it look more worn that it was, as she stalked out of the main area of the Kirken's little nest, into the last, largest area of the shipyard. Samus mused she cut a rather imposing figure, though not perhaps as much as she would in her armor. Still, it pleased her. Intimidation was as much one of her tools as her beam cannon.

Turning a corner after listening, she checked quickly and dived back, not even bothering to let her vision focus on the normal spectrum. A bright red network of energy at the far end of the room beyond the hall and various ghostly obstructions told her all she needed. "Ghenna Harker," the hunter called, projecting her voice easily. "Fancy meeting you here."

"Samus, long time no see," the other human greeted, followed by the _tink-tink-tock_ of a grenade bouncing down the hall she was in. Cursing, she blew a hole in a wall and dove through the weakened plasteel, singeing her clothes and hair from the heat of the abused material. It was ignored, as she did the same to the far wall again, putting her in the same room as Ghenna, while the hall and most of the forward section of the warehouse turned molten in the wake of a high-yield blast equitable to the Power-bombs she sometimes employed.

Idly, she hoped there was enough contraband left in this room to sweeten the deal a bit, otherwise that grenade just wasted a perfectly lootable mass of goods. Wasting no time, she picked three shots around her target, causing him to duck, then get thrown against the wall behind him as the cover he'd hidden behind erupted from her second shot.

The third grazed the man's right shoulder, and as she'd expected, muscle spasms had him dropping his own weapon as the affected limb reacted to the wound. "Ah! Damn it, woman." Groaning, the man scrabbled for his weapon with his responsive left hand, only to have it kicked away by Samus. There was one last moment where Ghenna reached futilely for the rifle, before he went limp where he lay. "Fine. Alright," he snarled, but without heat. "Do it."

"Oh you know this game," the woman replied in a playful tone. Holstering her own weapon, she leaned down, letting her vision clear back to normal light. The room, before just shades and ghosts and the alluring network of life before her, resolved into a makeshift lab, with a few interesting experiments – mostly in shambles – nearby. "Tell me why the locals want you dead, and I make it fast," she paused, running a hand down his exposed arm, letting the tiniest bit of her Metroid nature surface. The arms maker shuddered, as his skin grayed from the contact. "Or slow. Very, very slow."

"Dust," the man swore, using an epithet spacers had come up with since the first fast-drive ship hit such a low-signature phenomenon. There wasn't much left of those early ships, going into sub-light speeds when they hit the veritable wall of stationary, dense, invisible matter. "Dust, what the hell did they _do_ to you?"

Content to make smalltalk – after all, Ghenna did supply her weapons recently – Samus sat beside the man, prodding him with a medical stim. "That'll keep you lucid and not-dead long enough to chat," she replied as if speaking of inconsequential things, rather than the man's life. "So, what's got the locals wound up? Tell me a story, and maybe I'll return the favor."

"A bedtime story?" The arms maker mused, an edge of hysteria in his voice. "That's cute. Real cute... eh, the hell not." Shuffling back against the wall, Harker looked out over his shop with a bitter expression. "See, we weren't just working on our own stuff. You obviously ran into Tgh'voon. Big guy, red, had a Fed rifle on him?"

Nodding, Samus tapped a Staker on the concrete floor. "Yeah. Good thing I had him pegged before you dropped that housecleaner back there. Speaking of," oblivious to the man's wince, she jabbed the bleeding man with the metal stake. "Where did you get that?"

"Like I was saying," Ghenna muttered, trying not to let his eyes focus in on the shining metal spike in the bounty hunter's hands. "We're doing more than developing here." Another prod made him wince. "Right, right. We're fronting the shipping for some Fed action. They're flooding the Rim systems with low-grade or last generation weapons."

That caused Samus to pause, her brow furrowing. "That's... interesting. What else?"

Shaking his head, the sweating man heaved a breath. "Nothing else. Other than it's not just us. They got drops all over HF-349, HF-348, two of the Binary-LAS worlds, you name it. If it's on the Rim, and not Fed run, they're dropping people like me the goods."

"So that's why you dropped that grenade-"

"In case you weren't... well you," the man muttered. "Fuck. Samus Aran. 'Least I got iced by a pro, not some little dust punk."

He was cleaning his tracks, she figured, sitting back to consider the situation, as the man panted and winced where he sat. The small-time arms runner clean up she'd been assuming this was in the beginning started smelling wrong with the second Kirken waving around a Fed rifle. The Power-bomb payload grenade just cinched it. But Feds flooding Rim worlds with arms... she'd need to think on that some.

"So," the dying man muttered. "Where's my story?"

Eyes brightening as she focused, Samus grinned. "Right. Almost forgot with that moon-sized tidbit you handed me."

"Best be worth some quality yarn then," Ghenna grunted.

Samus knew just the tale. "How about I tell you how I became the last Metroid in the 'verse?"

Eyes glazing, the arms runner whistled. There weren't many people in the known universe that hadn't heard of those nightmares-made-real. "Yeah. That'll do."

A brief tale later, leaving out critical information just in case, Samus reached out and paused. Ghenna frowned and spat. "C'mon, hunter. Don't draw this out any more than you have already."

It wasn't a desire to be sadistic that made Samus pause any more than it was a desire to be dramatic. In truth, what caused her to hesitate was the nature of her Metroid's gift, and how it affected her when she drained the life from species who's minds she could comprehend. The Kirkens were sentient, sure, but alien enough for the intake of life to not 'touch' her. Ghenna... would be another matter.

Without looking up, she punched out, catching the man in the temple with the blunt side of her Staker. Ghenna's eyes rolled back and he fell unconscious, letting her think for a moment, without interruption. The urge to let her vision shift crept up on her, oily and insidious, a gentle lover's touch upon her mind. It _was_ beautiful, she had to admit, watching life itself. Ruby red, pulsing, flowing so much like blood but even more vital... Samus shook her head, clearing the urge. She also knew that it was one step on a slippery slope, though. That view of the world would only heighten the awareness of her own barely stifled hunger, and though she wasn't a murderer of innocents, having unconscious and available prey that she knew was going to die anyway just before her was too much temptation.

"Damn it, damn it..." leaning back on the same wall, Samus stared out at the room with blank eyes. It was why she took the mission... but it was also why she was out on a Rim world. To avoid species she could understand. The first time she'd fed on a human, it had taken three days to get her head on right... and she still had nightmares. Visions of a blonde woman with blue-green eyes, empty but for the hint of seething Metroid nuclei behind them, leaning over her while she slept. Some nights, she swore that her hair would flutter about her face, from phantom breaths on her neck.

Palming her eyes, the hunter slammed her head into the wall twice, before jumping up to her feet. "Well, Ghenna, looks like you get the easy way," she muttered, clicking off the safety and quickly evacuating the man's skull before she could rethink her decision. Almost disdainfully she threw the Staker through the man's ribs, knowing that without her special brand of death, those things would transmit true hours after clinical death.

Mind churning, half from hunger, half from her own muddled inhuman concerns, Samus idly pillaged the room, taking a few choice items and a few computer hard drives before she made her own exit with a slightly less destructive grenade.

She may be almost a monster, but there was no reason to crawl through a blown out warehouse and completely ruin her clothes.

–

"That's why I'm bothering _you_," Samus pointed out, jabbing a finger at her current company at the bar. The fact that they were on different sides of said bar didn't seem to matter much to their discussion. "I'm a run-and-gun kind of girl. Not a conspiracy theorist. I leave that to the crazies."

Jono Boler was the most talented crazy she knew. The man was so paranoid of the Feds he ran to the Rim on fumes, and set up shop selling distilled hydroponics as liquor to anyone who'd shell out a few credits, using a hobbled together translator as a medium. He had reason to be scared, however, unlike some of the crazies.

His bad luck with the Galactic Federation began not by his own mistakes, but by those of his superiors. One of the leading xenobiologists employed by the legit side of the Feds, Jono had the misfortune of having a braggart and idiot for a boss. In time, he'd heard the wrong kind of thing being bragged about, and was marked for an unscheduled, unpaid, permanent vacation.

Of course, not being a decade-experienced bounty hunter like her, Jono had bolted at the first sign of trouble, which landed him out on the Rim. What landed her in his bar was a bounty – small, but easy – that had been issued discreetly by his former boss to save face. He'd given her a counteroffer, a discount on quality alcohol and his services as a biologist if she'd kindly not hollow out his skull.

Samus figured she got the better end of the deal – considering the man's bounty was _tiny_, cheapskate Feds – and helped him go to ground a bit more effectively. Taking his _actual name_ off the bar's sign and deed went a long way toward that.

She regarded the man, idly polishing a glass with a receipt, while a confused customer looked a the dish towel he'd been given in confusion with a raised brow. Brilliant biologist – yes. Loaded with common sense – not so much. "I can make a few guesses," the somewhat reedy man finally noted, putting down his now hopelessly stained glass. "But I have nothing definite."

The bounty hunter shrugged, "Pour me a guess, then."

"Alright," the barkeep noted, shooting nervous looks around himself. "Least likely. They're setting up stockpiles ahead of time, for a military action."

"Why hand them to locals," she shot back, shaking her head.

"Least likely," Jono pointed out, again. "But keep it in mind. Next, which I think is most likely, they're quietly setting up for wide-scale rioting."

The mug full of distilled carbon-scrubber fruit paused on the way to her mouth. "That makes no sense."

Jono shrugged, jerking his head toward the back and his small office. "Maybe. C'mon, we need to settle your tab."

Brow furrowed and somewhat ill-tempered at his – in her opinion – pointless fear, Samus followed. A single catcall cut off mid-sentence when she nailed the offender in the face with her hy-polymer mug. Best thing to ever hit a bar, she noted again with satisfaction, were cups made out of starship-grade glasses.

As soon as the door shut behind her, Jono whirled around, looking antsy. "Do you have to assault every customer that hits on you? Can't you just... I don't know – not be a psychopath? Could you be more socially inept?"

Samus blinked once, and waited a slow count of five, holding the other man's gaze, before answering. "Yes."

That single, infectionless syllable reminded the barkeep who he was talking to – and the fact she had personally exterminated two supposedly apocalyptic species, three planets, and the High Command of the Space Pirates not once, but repeatedly, on her own. "Well," he sputtered a moment, blinking rapidly. "That's just fine then."

"Yeah, I thought so too. I mean he's still breathing," Samus pointed out without humor.

"Right," Jono agreed, sitting down at his small desk. Scrubbing a hand over his face, the biologist-made-barkeep sighed. "Alright. Now for what I really think.

"Say you were the Feds, and wanted to move in on the Rim. What would you do?"

Samus laughed, a single sharp sound. "I wouldn't. They'd not get past the inner arms. There's only one thing the Rim races hate more than each other, and that's anyone trying to make them get along and play nice."

Jono nodded, a worried look on his face. "Now, that's usually true. The Rim factions only really get along to keep the Feds out. And they do that well. But say the Feds did something sneaky this time. Say they started making a lot of higher quality weapons show up, on the lowest rung worlds in the Rim."

Tapping her fingers on the desk, Samus nodded. "Alright, so... the local factions would want those arms, so they could be better equipped than their rivals. Also, to keep them out of their hands. They'd run collectors around, scooping them up, causing riots on the slum sectors."

"Alright, part one done. Internal conflict and civil wars," Jono pointed out, almost idly. With a jolt, Samus realized she'd been running part of this plan, and not twelve hours before. It settled a cold worry in her gut. "Now, we got slum sectors all pissed off and distracting the faction rulers. The factions heads now also have a glut of arms, and axes to grind at their neighbors. That's always the bottleneck in these things – not fighters, but guns to give them."

Nodding, Samus picked up on the thread Jono was leading her with, "Open faction wars, only this time, more damaging, more casualties."

"Less resistance later, when the Feds come, with a more secure invasion fleet," Jono finished with a grim expression. "You got something from that warehouse?"

Fishing about in her pocket, Samus pulled out a simple flash-bang grenade. Small and not really illegal, they were little more than a nuisance item. "Here."

The former scientist tore the grenade apart with startling speed, holding up a small, almost tiny bit of circuit. "Lock-chip. Simple, probably half got busted in transit, but it'd be enough."

"Feds could cripple an army, low-jacking their guns."

"And they'd do it too," Jono pointed out, unnecessarily. "Probably only way to fund this. Provide 'assurance' that their boys won't get mowed down by their own guns. Who cares of some of the chips break? Obviously, they would be right to move in on the Rim, if they were stockpiling and bypassing GF weapon security measures."

The sarcasm Jono's last comment was laced with didn't escape the hunter. "Hell. They could smuggle in their own ops teams without gear, and have them do on site pickups too." Scrubbing a hand through her hair, Samus sighed. "Great. So now they're looking this way. Why?"

Jono snorted. "Why not? Human imperialism is practically genetic."

Samus wasn't convinced, but she conceded the point. "Alright. Say you're right. They'd need inside people, to let them know that the riots, and wars were going on, and when. If they get caught out entering the Rim while the factions are still paying attention, they'd get slaughtered."

"They'd have to be calling home," the barkeep muttered. "Secure, too. Transmission keys would be kept in the systems, but we'd need the end key to open up the data-stream. End keys are only going to be on Fed stations."

"I don't like that look," the bounty hunter noted, seeing a familiar gleam in the former biologist's eye. It was the same one she'd had, after getting briefed about Metroids, so long ago.

Jono's expression went from contemplative to annoyed. "What? I may think it's backwater, but this is home. I like not having every word, every meal, every time I go to take a shit recorded for potential threat assessment. The GF was a good idea on paper – people fucked it up. Was going to happen regardless. But I'll be damned if I want the last place in the galaxy free of them to get put under the scope."

"Could always move to the core," Samus shot back, but without heat. She knew that'd be just as bad – nothing lived that close to the galactic center. Far too much radiation, too many nearby stars. "Alright. Say we plan to try and do something about this-"

"Not tonight. I need to think – and you need to get out of my bar."

Samus agreed with at least one of those statements. "Yeah, fine."

To her amusement, she found the customer from earlier, drinking what appeared to be a local brew from the ink-stained glass. She raised her brow, but the alien only shrugged and grumbled out a "takes the bite off," before ignoring her.

Samus stared at her own receipt, then shook her head hard. "Not worth it," she muttered, leaving the bar with a distant air. There was much to think about.

–

Proof that Jono's idea may be more than paranoid musing came a day or so after her previous bounty run. Out of curiosity, she accessed her terminal, spent a few hundred extra credits for a wider network access, and scanned for other jobs, with the filter for 'arms' or 'smuggling'. Her board almost literally lit up with responses. Oddly, she found more than a few being issued from similar corporations, for planets outside their origin.

That on its own should have triggered some alarms, but the fact those corps were faction security consulting offices worried her.

If the factions knew of the plan, what were they doing? It reminded her of those dreadful strategy games. Armies put on a map, and a set amount of resources allocated to them, with the goal of defeating the other armies and taking their land and wealth. So, perhaps the factions did know, but they were too confident in their security? Perhaps they felt they could end a local power struggle before the Federation mustered a fleet. A fleet in all likelihood already waiting.

This was either the scramble to collect the arms Jono had warned about, or a precursor to that, staged by Federation plants to start such a thing. "Tch. Listen to me," Samus muttered. "Now I'm thinking like a crazy."

Except it wasn't crazy. And what she'd been trying not to think about kept creeping up on her. Questions Adam, the AI who was once her liaison in the GF, had asked before the Federation had terminated his remote core.

_ "Why would the Federation need SA-X, with the Pirates on the run?"_

_ "Why the X parasite at all? Do they _want_ to exterminate a planet's ecosystem?"_

_ "X and Metroids. Why both. Backup plan? Or something bigger?"_

_ "Why you? Why not try for something else, someone else? Is it the Chozo factor? Or is there more?"_

_ "How and why did the Federation mimic Chozo methods to update your suit?"_

If she stopped denying herself, she knew the answer to much of the AI's questions. Who else in the Federation had her track record? Who else could go up to the Pirate Lords and walk away, in one piece? What else could utterly destroy a planet, then clean it free of that same taint, then come back and make it ready for new colonists? What other technology could be a modular, threat-based counter?

X would clean the planets they encountered. Then, they'd send in Metroids, to clean up the X infestation. Last, they'd send in SA-X clones, under their control, to annihilate the Metroids. They could even use the SA-X to soften up the invasions, taking out primary targets first, before moving on and letting the simpler X parasites finish the job.

No wonder the Federation was gunning for her, harder than the High Pirate Command now. She'd undone their entire invasion strategy, before it'd left the labs. And now that she knew they were capable of cloning Metroids and had the potential to control the X, and proof of it, she was more dangerous than the Pirates. She was a Galactic hero, who could undo their shiny moral pillar, bringing them down to the same level as any other despotic government. Probably, outside of Mother Brain herself, the most dangerous person in the galaxy.

"Hell, if it wasn't for K2-L-"

She shook her head hard, dismissing that notion. There was no way she could put aside her issues with the Space Pirates, and less chance they'd put aside her nearly genocidal actions against them. Still, it brought to mind her recent shift in opinion, considering her loyalties.

Hands idling on the terminal's controls, Samus considered her position. First, there was the GF – Galactic Federation, the current source of her concerns. The Galactic Federation, a mostly human-controlled body, spanning much of the galaxy's inhabited planets and stations, primarily those on the Orion-Cygnus Spur and neighboring area of the Perseus Arm, liked to say they advocated a purely benign view. For simplicity's sake, she considered it in control of the 'south' of the galaxy. Snorting, she put aside her opinion on their beneficent status for later.

Next, was the Federation's primary adversaries and a faction Samus considered herself an expert on, the Space Pirate Consortium. Usually just referred to as 'Pirates', the faction was made up of like-minded species, mostly bent on the subjugation and marauding of other races and planets, using them for slaves, labor, plunder, or just sport. For almost a decade, it was thought that Zebes was the original home of the Pirates, as Mother Brain, a prototypical Aurora Unit developed by the Chozo was based there, having turned traitor with the slow death of her creators. Untrue, the Space Pirate home world, Urtraghus, was the origin of the insectoid species most considered representative of the Pirates. Pirate High Command was never in one place long, always shifting with both the paranoia of its membership, and the displacement of constant assassinations from sources both inside and out. The one constant about the Pirates, was their conquest drive, usually fueled by member species that exhausted their home worlds, and had to turn skyward to survive. Urtraghus was located in the 'eastern' Crux-Scutum Arm, with Zebes sitting along the Sagittarius Arm, at 4,500 light-years distant, making an uneven triangle.

The Rim, named for its position along the outmost part of the Crux Arm, sat almost directly opposite the two other factions, making it both remote and difficult to reach in the far 'north'. One simply could not pass through the galactic core, after all. Instead, routes were made jumping from distant systems around the deadly mass of luminous light at the center of the galaxy, or for the truly brave, along the empty black of the galactic face, risking miscalculation that could see a ship terminally stranded away from safe port. Its simple position made for a reasonable defense, but add in the highly distrustful and xenophobic nature of the Rim factions, and one had a very solid and unwelcoming front to deal with. Those same controlling factions had held control of the Rim longer than the GF or the Pirates had been in space, and had no interest in their politics.

Samus liked the Rim, mostly due to its isolationist nature. Like her, the factions preferred their privacy, and defended it viciously, feeling outside influences would destroy what history and culture they maintained. Still, controlled influx and contact was allowed, as trade between both distant factions proved immensely lucrative.

But trade was the limit, in most cases. Some Rim worlds were closed to non-native or species not allied with their ruling protectorate, altogether. Samus had even heard word that some very remote worlds held remnants of ancient Chozo influence, which initially surprised her, considering the vast reach of her adopted people. She didn't have the drive or the means to explore those rumors, however, considering her very limited ability to travel within the Rim. None of the things she heard hinted at living Chozo – merely their relics. Perhaps she could find more technology to use, something familiar, but what would she do with it? It was a rare thing to find compatible parts for her Power Suit, and now with it changed so much, would those fragments of the past even interface? She was afraid to find out, not wanting to loose anymore of her legacy.

Tossing her datapad into the air idly, she considered another possibility. "...wonder if the GF kept any of those upgrade data packets?"

Provided Jono maintained his reputation as a crazy, and convinced her to stop this Fed invasion before it started, she might just find a way to answer that question.

Samus smirked as she rolled over, keying in the thunderstorm recording on her terminal. It was a testament to her jaded nature that she didn't even blink at the idea of opposing the GF anymore. Time would tell, however, if the more insidious presence in her blood would try and take advantage of her new-found views. Taking a strap out of the hide of the Feds over what happened on BSL and to Adam was one thing... "Putting myself in a place where the hunger's going to have me looking at every human around me like a potential meal... Yeah." She muttered, keying off her room light. "That's going to take some thought."


End file.
